Lead Mobile Engineer in London

Collinson is a global loyalty and benefits company. We use our expertise and products to craft customer experiences which enable some of the world's best known brands to acquire, engage and retain the most demanding and choice-rich customers. In particular, our unique expertise and insight into high earning, frequent travellers allows us to create products and solutions for our clients that inspire greater customer engagement to drive more profitable relationships, enrich their travel experiences, protect what matters and assist in times of need.

While specialising in Financial Services, Travel and Retail, we also support clients in multiple sectors. We have worked with over 90 airlines, 20 hotel groups and more than 600 financial institutions and banks, with clients including Accor Hotels, Air France KLM, American Express, British Airways, Cathay Pacific, Diners Club, Mandarin Oriental, Mastercard, Radisson Hotel Group, Sephora, Visa and Vhi.

We take our 30 years' experience working with these kinds of household names in over 170 countries, and help our clients to deliver the smarter experiences it takes to differentiate their propositions, and help them win deeper devotion with their customers. Collinson is a privately-owned entrepreneurial business with 2,000 passionate people working in 20 locations worldwide. Our solutions include Priority Pass, the world's best known airport experiences programme, while we are also the trusted partner behind many of the leading financial services, airline and hotel brand's reward programmes and loyalty initiatives.

Purpose of the job

As a Mobile Squad Lead Engineer, you'll be the technical backbone of your mobile squad (around 5-7 engineers), leading from the front, writing code daily, and setting the standard for high-quality mobile engineering across Android and iOS. You'll work closely with an Engineering Manager to ensure your squad delivers scalable, well-architected mobile applications, while partnering with a Product Manager and UX team to build and ship mobile-first features and experiences. This is a hands-on role with a strong focus on mobile architecture, coding, and problem-solving. You'll be the most experienced mobile engineer in the squad, responsible for refining technical requirements, making key platform decisions, and mentoring engineers to help them grow.

Using modern mobile technologies and architectures, you'll build and evolve native Android and iOS applications, integrating seamlessly with backend services and cloud platforms. If you enjoy building polished mobile products, solving complex platform challenges, and shaping the technical direction of a mobile team, this role gives you the autonomy, responsibility, and impact to do so.

Key Responsibilities

• Lead the design and development of native Android and iOS applications, ensuring they are scalable, performant, secure, and well-architected.
• Provide technical leadership to the squad, guiding decisions on mobile architecture, frameworks, libraries, and best practices in code quality, performance, accessibility, and security.
• Remain highly hands-on, spending most of your time writing and reviewing mobile code, and ensuring high-quality, maintainable applications.
• Collaborate closely with backend engineers to design and consume APIs that support robust and efficient mobile experiences.
• Mentor and coach mobile engineers, fostering a culture of continuous learning, strong ownership, and technical excellence.
• Own mobile build, release, and deployment processes, including CI/CD pipelines and app store submissions for Google Play and Apple App Store.
• Champion automated testing, app stability, observability, and the responsible use of AI to improve developer productivity and software quality.

Knowledge, skills and experience required

• 7+ years of professional software engineering experience, with a strong focus on mobile application development.
• Strong experience building native Android and native iOS applications, with a deep understanding of modern mobile architectures and best practices.
• Previous experience as a Lead Engineer, Tech Lead, or Senior Mobile Engineer leading a small team.
• Proven experience integrating AI-assisted development tools and techniques into everyday workflows (e.g. code generation, testing, debugging, performance analysis, or automation).
• Hands-on experience integrating mobile apps with backend APIs (REST and/or GraphQL) and cloud-based services.
• Strong focus on testing and quality, with experience using mobile testing frameworks and automated testing approaches.
• Experience owning mobile CI/CD pipelines, build automation, and app store release processes.
• An observability mindset, with experience using crash reporting, performance monitoring, and analytics tools to improve app reliability.
• Comfortable working with Git, Jira, Confluence, and modern agile engineering workflows.
• Proven ability to mentor engineers, review code and designs, and balance pragmatism with mobile engineering excellence.

Interview Process

We want our process to be fair and transparent, so it's only right that we tell you what the various interview stages are:

• Stage 1 – A short call with one of our Engineering Managers for around 30 minutes, who will tell you more about the team, our products, technology and ask questions about your career history and suitability for the role.
• Stage 2 – A technical test (at home), reviewed for your solution and approach.
• Stage 3 – A 60-90 minute meeting where you'll spend time with different members of the engineering team (Engineering Manager/Lead). This will also cover your technical test and questions on some of your decisions and implementation.
• Stage 4 – A 30-60 minute discussion with the VP of Engineering.

Collinson is an equal opportunity employer and welcomes differences in all their forms including: colour, race, ethnicity, gender identity, sexual orientation, neurodivergence, family status, age, individuals with disabilities and people from all backgrounds, cultures and experiences as we strongly believe this contributes to our on-going success. We are focused on continually evolving our purpose driven, high performing culture, providing an environment where our people have the opportunity to achieve their full potential and do interesting and meaningful work. Our company values are: Take Action, Do the right thing, One team and Be insight led. These help guide everything we do internally in terms of how we think, act and interact, right through to how we deliver value to our customers and clients.

In your application, please feel free to note which pronouns you use (For example - she/her/hers, he/him/his, they/them/theirs, etc). If you need any extra support throughout the interview process, then please email us at ukrecruitment@collinsongroup.com